4. HOW
• All activity remains anonymous to students.
• Educators are able to view the identity of
questions and comments.
• Educators have the ability to delete
inappropriate questions
5. BENEFITS TO STUDENTS
• Designing questions
• Choosing distractors
• Writing explanations
• Answering questions
• Evaluating quality
6. BENEFITS TO EDUCATORS
• Early feedback
• Large test banks
• Student confidence
• Large classes
7. SIT RESEARCH
• HYPOTHESIS: Participating in a PeerWise online community of
practice provided opportunities for knowledge building and
consolidating understanding to nursing students t the Southern
Institute of Technology in the third year of their Bachelor of Nursing
programme”.
• First study in New Zealand (nursing students)
• Quantitative research method within the conceptual framework of
descriptive research
• Survey Technique
• Manifest content analysis
9. YOUR TURN
1. http://peerwise.cs.auckland.ac.nz/at/?sit_nz
2. Register
3. To access our course, "Peerwise - A teaching and
learning tool", you will need to enter two pieces of
information:
1) Course ID = 6256
2) Identifier = Please enter your highlighted
identifier
that are created, answered, rated and discussed by students and/or educators
Generating a question requires students to think carefully about the topics of the course and how they relate to the learning outcomes. Writing questions focuses attention on the learning outcomes and makes teaching and learning goals more apparent to students.
The act of creating plausible distracters (multiple-choice alternatives) requires students to consider misconceptions, ambiguity and possible interpretations of concepts.
Explanations require students to express their understanding of a topic with as much clarity as possible. This acts to develop their written communication skills and deepen their understanding.
Answering questions in a drill and practice fashion reinforces learning, and incorporates elements of self-assessment. Students are shown how others have answered the same questions, allowing them to gauge how well they are coping in the course.
Evaluating existing questions incorporates higher-order cognitive skills, requiring a student to consider not only the content, but what makes a particular question more effective than other questions
Instructors can see how students are answering individual questions in real-time, and can identify and address common misunderstandings in a timely fashion. Analysing student comments can reveal further insight into the student perception of topics within the course.
The development of MCQ test banks is a very time consuming activity, and placing this in the hands of the students is a fast, low cost way for instructors to have access to a large body of MCQ test items designed specifically to test the course content.
By evaluating the topic areas that students have created questions for, instructors can get a sense of which topics students are more confident with and which topics students are not engaged with.
PeerWise performs well in large classes. The number of high-quality questions is greater and students therefore have access to a higher number of effective questions
Burns and Grove (2009) proposed that descriptive research “provides an accurate portrayal or account of characteristics of a particular individual, event, or group in real life situations for the purpose of discovering new meaning, describing what exists, determining the frequency with which something occurs, and categorizing information” (pg. 766).
Manifest content analysis was viewed as an appropriate tool by which to analyse the questionnaire data. The strength of this tool lay in its deductive ability to generate statistical evidence by measuring the incidence of recurrent descriptors within the pre-determined framework of categories.
As a Nursing Educator, introducing an online community of practice into the Bachelor of Nursing programme in 2012 at the Southern Institute of Technology was in response to the reduced contact hours allocated for revision due to a directive from the Nursing Council of New Zealand. As the paper coordinator for a third year clinical paper titled ‘Nursing in the Acute Setting’, I decided to implement the web- based programme Peerwise after attending at a conference the previous year where this was introduced to me. I hypothesised that this web-based programme had the potential to provide knowledge building and consolidation to the nursing students in the third year of their Bachelor of Nursing programme.
The results from this study supported my hypothesis that Peerwise would provide knowledge building and consolidation opportunities for year three Bachelor of Nursing students. The dominance of the student’s opinions being ‘strongly agree’ and ‘somewhat agree’ provided evidence that the 2012 cohort of third year nursing students found that participating in an online community of practice provided opportunities for knowledge building and consolidating understanding to nursing students in the third year of their Bachelor of Nursing programme.
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